Still on the topic of seeing/drawing. Yes , I should think we all know
about Lowenfeld and his developemental stages and yes it is very important
to know. But I think there are still some clichés that children draw
because they see other children draw them and they even see grown-ups do
them like the "m birds". I also find it interesting to think of the
differences between drawing from observation and drawing from description
by a grown-up. I am interested in hearing what people think of it. I
personally favor teaching my students how to see and then draw from
observation rather than teaching them some tricks or formulas how to draw
certain things.I think I have mentioned it before but Rudolph Arnheim in
his book book Thoughts on Arts Education talks about how children draw what
they see "but they are not just trying to copy nature but compose highly
abstract geometric shapes that are responses to properties extracted from
nature: the roundness of a head the straighness of a leg". Anyway it is a
very interesting book.
I also want to mention (someone was talking about triangle mountains) that
we live in a very mountainous land and icelandic students do not typically
make triangle mountains. In a project on mountains I have just finished
with my 8 and 9 yrs. old students of fifteen pictures of mountains they
drew very quickly only one could have been classified as triangle
mountains. One must remember some mountains are quite like triangles or
pyramids. Anyway the students then used their preliminary drawings to make
big paintings of mountains and none were like triangles. Just thought I´d
mention this for fun. By the way our mountains have no trees so one can see
the formations very well, I wonder if that makes a difference.
Well this has become too long.
Best regards from the far north, Rosa